It is no wonder that the Ohio Company found the New Englanders eager
to come out and possess this goodly heritage, and that the first band
should have started from Dr. Cutler’s own village. At dawn, on the
30th of December, 1787, they paraded before his church and parsonage,
twenty-two men with their families. After listening to a short speech
from him, they fired a salute, and set off, as the lettering on their
leading wagon made known, “For the Ohio Country.” It was eight weeks
before they reached the headwaters of the Beautiful River, and began to
build boats to float down its current to the mouth of the Muskingum.
In the meantime, on the 1st of January, 1788, another company left
Hartford, Connecticut, and in four weeks joined the first. They could
not embark on their voyage together until April 2d, but in five days
they arrived at Fort Harmar, beside the Muskingum, and were at their
journey’s end. They did not find the shores waving with indigo, silk,
and cotton, but they saw that the soil could produce almost any
crop, and the weather was so mild and lovely that they must have been
confirmed in their belief of all that Dr. Cutler had told them of the
climate. Captain Pipe, the Delaware chief who had brought Crawford to
his death of cruel torment a few years before, was encamped for trade
near the military post, and with seventy other Indians he welcomed the
newcomers to the Muskingum, where they wisely built a stockade as soon
as they could for defense against their red friends. They settled down
at once to hew their fields out of the forest, and the very next year
they had a school for their children. Bathsheba Rouse taught this first
Ohio school, and Ohio women may well be proud that she taught it a whole
year before a man taught the next Ohio school. The settlers called their
town Adelphia, but soon changed its name to Marietta, which they made up
from the name of the French queen Marie Antoinette, though Marietta was
a common enough name in Italian before their invention of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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